Korean GP: Strategy Summary

Freshly crowned, Sebastian Vettel won his tenth Grand Prix of the season in South Korea after taking the lead at the first corner and using an effective pit stop strategy to maintain his advantage. The German now has the chance to equal Michael Schumacher’s record of 13 wins in a single season. With this 25th victory and Mark Webber’s third-place finish, Red Bull Racing completes a full sweep of the season, crowned with a second consecutive constructors’ title.

The Korean Grand Prix weekend started wet on Friday, giving teams only an hour to run on a dry track on Saturday morning and assess the performance of Pirelli slick tires with different fuel loads before qualifying and the race. As a result, the teams still had many question marks at the start of the race, held on a dry track: last year’s inaugural race had started under a safety car procedure.

The Red Bull Racing duo opted for an unusual strategy during qualifying by exclusively using the super-soft red-walled tires, in order to preserve the yellow-walled soft compound for the race. In contrast, McLaren and Ferrari chose to keep as many sets of super-soft tires as possible. All drivers who finished the race made two pit stops, except for the Sauber duo of Kamui Kobayashi / Sergio Perez, and Vitantonio Liuzzi’s HRT, who made three stops due to technical issues or safety reasons in the case of the Mexican driver.

Vettel, however, used the super-soft tire for his first two stints, before switching to softs for the final part of the race. He thus did not need to use his full tire allocation to win with a 12-second lead. Webber finished in third place after battling throughout the race against Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren, who started from pole for the first time this season. This second place marks the Briton’s first podium finish since the German Grand Prix, which he had won. Only five seconds separated the second from the fifth at the finish line. Jaime Alguersuari (Toro Rosso) equaled his career-best performance by finishing seventh. The Spaniard ran his race on a two-stop strategy, with the first two stints on super-softs and a final long run on softs, just like Vettel.

The Korean Grand Prix was the last appearance in 2011 of the red-walled super-soft tires, also used in Monaco, Canada, Hungary, and Singapore. The last three races of the season will be contested with the soft, medium, and hard compounds.

Paul Hembery, Pirelli Motorsport Director: Despite having opted for a bold tire choice for this race and the fact that the teams had little data due to Friday’s rain, we immediately saw the super-softs last more than 10 laps at the start of the race with a full fuel load, then the softs last more than 20 laps. It is clear that the track evolved a lot in a short period, and we understood from the first pit stop dance that two-stop strategies were emerging, which is fewer than we had predicted. We saw different strategies, but the drivers maintained an excellent pace with both compounds, dispelling pre-Grand Prix speculations that four stops or more would be necessary due to excessive degradation. Moreover, Vettel set the fastest lap time in the final lap with the soft tires. Finally, I wish to congratulate Red Bull Racing for once again winning the constructors’ title at the end of what has been a remarkable season for them.

[From the official Pirelli press release]

To gain a better understanding of this graph, you can use the FIA’s lap-by-lap summary by clicking here.